Even more on public professors

I just wrote this in the previous entry but it was way at the bottom and I doubt anyone will bother struggling through my terrible prose to find it. So Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed piece on the need for more public intellectuals - something which I have previously agreed with. Kristof makes a glaring omission that I somehow didn't think of until my 15 minutes were almost up.

The most famous public intellectual (and the most trusted man in America according to some surveys) is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky. One of Chomsky's first big political splashes was his description of the limits of acceptable opinion. You can be a (very) little to the left on an issue or you can be (very) little to the right on it. But if you are outside the bounds of acceptable opinion, you might as well not say or write anything because no one will publish it. Of course, we have the interwebs now and you can publish it yourself on your blog or your Facebook page. And ten of your very best friends (who already agree with you) will read it. But if it gets too big and too many people read it, you will be excoriated in the journals that make public opinion as a radical. Maybe a radical liberal maybe a radical conservative but you will be described as a potentially dangerous lunatic either way.

So why do professors bury themselves in arcana? Partially because many fields of human knowledge are genuinely so fucking complex everything we don't already know seems like arcana to those of us who aren't specialists in the field. Anyone out there really understand anything beyond 12th grade particle physics? And partially because everything written above an 8th grade level seems like arcana to people who read newspapers. I happen to know a whole lot about the Roman concept of imperium, anyone interested? And partially because the spectrum of acceptable opinion is too fucking small for them to contribute anyway. I would really like to publish my opinions of American foreign policy since 1950, anyone want to print them for me?